Lean Thinking is what I’m trying to learn and adopt at the moment.
What a perfect coincidence that I stumbled over Scaling Lean & Agile Development: Thinking and Organizational Tools for Large-Scale Scrum from Craig Larman and Bas Vodde. On page 54 they describe Kaizen, one of the crucial Lean Principles, as a plausible “inspect & adapt”:
- choose and practice techniques the team and/or product group has agreed to try, until they are well understood
- experiment until you find a better way
- repeat forever
When I try to find this Kaizen practice in my work of the last years, it fits to what I call the “soft agile transition from nowhere to Scrum.” 😉
Here is the formula:
(0) Nothing > (1) Daily communication > (2) Visual Workflow > (3) Kanban > (4) Scrumban > (5) Scrum
When we started working with agile techniques we had a divergent mindset in our product teams. Only one team was ready and willing to start with Scrum straight away. Other teams were reluctant to try anything agile and stayed with “Nothing” or were led by project management.
By now all our teams are somewhere in the “soft agile transition from nowhere to Scrum” and I’m happy that all of them have passed step “(1) Daily communication” already.
The above described Kaizen was my fundamental line of action to move step by step from (0) to (5).
What are your experiences with introducing agile techniques to your company?
Characteristics of the “soft agile transition from nowhere to Scrum”
(0) Nothing
– Black Box
– Led by Project Management
(1) Daily communication
– Daily Scrum
(2) Visual Workflow
– Daily Scrum
– Team board
– Regular Retrospectives
(3) Kanban
– Daily Scrum
– Team board
– Regular Retrospectives
– WIP
– Lead Time
– Optimize size of batches
(4) Scrumban
– Daily Scrum
– Team board
– Regular Retrospectives
– WIP
– Lead Time
– Optimize size of batches
– Agile Estimation
– Regular Review Meetings
– Release Plan via Lead Time
(5) Scrum
Do it without ScrumButs